Shopify migration services, and the three things that do not come with you
Products and collections move fine. Your customers cannot bring their passwords, their saved cards stay behind, and every indexed URL changes because Shopify imposes its own paths. Everyone plans the product import. Almost nobody plans for the rest.
Data, theme, apps, redirects and the customer reactivation campaign, planned before anyone touches a store.
What are Shopify migration services?
Shopify migration services cover moving a store onto Shopify end to end: exporting and importing products, variants, collections, customers and order history, rebuilding the theme, finding equivalents for the apps and functionality you relied on, mapping every old URL to its new address, and handling the customer reactivation that the platform makes unavoidable.
One boundary worth stating. SEO migration services cover protecting rankings through any replatform on any platform, and that discipline applies here too.
Shopify migration services are the platform move itself: the data, the build, the app equivalents and the constraints Shopify specifically imposes. On most projects you want both, and they are run as one plan rather than two.
What breaks, and why nobody warns you
These four are not edge cases. They happen on every migration to Shopify and they are the ones that generate the difficult conversations after launch.
Customer passwords cannot be migrated. They are hashed irreversibly on the platform you are leaving, so no tool can move them. Every existing customer has to reactivate their account through an email invite. That is a deliverability problem, a marketing campaign and a churn risk arriving at the same moment, and it needs planning rather than discovering.
Saved payment methods stay behind. Stored cards, PayPal tokens and buy now pay later agreements do not transfer. For a subscription business this is the single largest risk in the whole project, because every active subscriber has to re-enter payment details.
Every URL changes, and that is not negotiable. Shopify forces its own structure with /products/ and /collections/ prefixes that cannot be removed on standard plans. Whatever your old URLs looked like, almost every indexed address gets a new one, which makes the redirect map the most important deliverable of the project rather than an afterthought.
Order history imports for reporting, not for working with. Historical orders come across so your reporting and customer records make sense, but they do not behave as live orders. You cannot refund or fulfil against them. Support teams need to know this before a customer asks about an order from last year.
Redirect capacity is worth checking early too. Standard plans support up to 100,000 redirects and Plus supports up to 20 million, which only becomes a problem on very large catalogues, but it is an unpleasant discovery mid-project.
What moves, what degrades, what stays behind
Print this and walk your team through it before the project starts. Most migration disputes are about expectations set in this table.
| Item | Moves? | What you need to know |
|---|---|---|
| Products and variants | Yes | SKUs, prices, options and images all transfer cleanly |
| Collections | Yes | Structure moves, though smart collection rules often need rebuilding |
| Customer records | Yes | Names, addresses and history, but not the ability to log in |
| Metafields and custom data | Yes | With the right tooling. This is where cheap migrations cut corners |
| Blog posts and pages | Yes | Content moves, URLs change, redirects required |
| Order history | Partly | Reporting only. No refunds or fulfilment against imported orders |
| Reviews | Depends | Tied to whichever app held them. Export before you cancel anything |
| Customer passwords | No | Impossible. Reactivation by email invite is the only route |
| Saved payment methods | No | Cards, PayPal tokens and BNPL agreements all stay behind |
| Subscriptions | No, in effect | Subscribers must re-enrol with new payment details |
| URL structure | No | Shopify imposes /products/ and /collections/ on standard plans |
The reviews row catches people out regularly. Reviews usually live inside an app rather than the platform, so cancelling the old app before exporting loses years of social proof permanently.
What our Shopify migration services cover
A migration is four projects that happen to launch on the same day. All four have to be planned.
Pre-migration audit
What you have, what ranks, what is actually used, and what can safely be left behind. Migrating a catalogue nobody has pruned in six years is paying to move rubbish.
Data migration
Products, variants, collections, customers, orders, pages and metafields, mapped and imported with validation rather than a single hopeful CSV upload.
Redirect mapping
Every old URL matched to its closest new equivalent, one to one wherever possible. This is the deliverable that decides whether traffic survives.
Theme build
Rebuilt in Online Store 2.0 rather than approximated from the old design, so you are not carrying a decade of another platform’s decisions into a new store.
App and functionality mapping
Every feature your old platform provided matched to a Shopify app, a native capability or a custom build. The gaps are found here, not in week six.
Customer reactivation campaign
Because passwords cannot move, this is a planned campaign with sensible timing, warm sending and a fallback for people who ignore the first email.
Reviews and social proof
Exported before anything is cancelled and reimported into whichever Shopify app you land on. Losing these is permanent and entirely avoidable.
Subscription transition
Where subscriptions exist, a re-enrolment plan with comms, incentives and a realistic expectation of what percentage returns.
Post-launch monitoring
Crawl errors, redirect failures, ranking movement and conversion, watched daily for the first fortnight when problems are still cheap to fix.
Before any of it, run a free SEO audit of the site you are leaving. You cannot protect rankings you never recorded, and a pre-migration baseline is the only way to know afterwards whether something broke or simply moved.
How a Shopify migration runs
Baseline everything first
Rankings, traffic, top URLs, conversion and revenue by page, recorded before anything changes. Without this you cannot tell a migration problem from a seasonal dip.
Build in parallel, not in place
The new store is built and populated while the old one keeps trading. Nothing goes dark, and the launch becomes a switch rather than a gap.
Map redirects before launch, not after
Every indexed URL matched and tested against the staging store. Redirects written after launch are redirects written while traffic is already being lost.
Launch, then watch closely
Go live at a quiet trading hour, reactivation campaign timed deliberately, and daily monitoring for a fortnight. Most migration damage is done in the first week and fixed cheaply if noticed.
Your customers cannot log in on day one
This deserves its own section because it is the part that surprises people, and because it is a marketing problem wearing a technical costume.
Why it cannot be fixed
Passwords are stored as irreversible hashes. Your old platform cannot hand them over in a usable form and no migration tool can recover them. This is a security feature working correctly.
What actually happens
Customers receive an account activation invite and set a new password. Open rates on those emails are exactly as good as your list health, which is to say frequently disappointing.
Where it goes wrong
Sending thousands of invites at once from a new domain, on launch day, alongside every other change. Deliverability suffers and the emails land in spam at the worst moment.
Sequencing it properly
Warmed sending, segmented by recency, spread across days rather than sent in one burst, with the most valuable customers contacted first and personally where volume allows.
Giving people a reason
A reactivation email that only asks for effort converts badly. One that arrives with an incentive, or with their order history visible, converts considerably better.
Briefing support first
Your team will field confused customers for weeks. They need to know why it happened and how to resolve it in one message rather than escalating each case.
Guest checkout keeps working throughout, so this affects account holders rather than sales outright. On a subscription business it is far more serious, because payment details have to be re-entered and every subscriber is a decision point.
What a migration will and will not do
Three things worth agreeing before the project rather than during it.
Expect a dip, and plan for it. Even a well executed migration usually sees a temporary drop while search engines recrawl and reassess. The job is to make it shallow and short rather than to pretend it will not happen. Anyone promising zero impact is guessing.
Migrating will not fix what was already broken. If the old store converted badly, ranked poorly or had a confusing catalogue, Shopify does not repair any of that. A migration is a good moment to fix those things deliberately, but they are separate work with separate value.
Some functionality genuinely has no equivalent. Occasionally a platform does something Shopify does not, and the honest options are a custom build, a workflow change or staying where you are. We would rather find that in the audit than three weeks before launch.
And one thing worth saying plainly: if your current platform is working and the only motivation is that Shopify seems easier, the migration cost and the reactivation risk may be larger than the problem you are solving.
How much do Shopify migration services cost?
Fixed price against a defined scope, because a migration quoted by the hour is a migration nobody has actually planned.
Migration audit and plan
Catalogue, data, apps, URL inventory and the risks specific to your platform, with a redirect strategy and a realistic timeline. Yours to keep either way.
Migration project
Data, theme, apps, redirects, reactivation campaign and launch, delivered against the plan. Fixed price once the audit has removed the unknowns.
Post-launch support
Monitoring, redirect fixes and recovery work for the first months. Optional, and the period where problems are still cheap.
Catalogue size matters less to the price than complexity does. Ten thousand simple products is a smaller job than four hundred products with configurators, subscriptions and a decade of custom URLs.
Migration alongside the rest of the move
SEO migration services
The ranking protection discipline that applies to any replatform. On a Shopify move the two run as one plan rather than two projects.
See SEO migration →Shopify development
The theme build and any custom functionality your old platform provided that Shopify does not do natively.
See development →Shopify SEO services
Collection architecture and duplicate URL control once you are on the platform, which is a different job from surviving the move itself.
See Shopify SEO →Common questions about migrating to Shopify
Yes, and there is no way around it. Passwords are stored as irreversible hashes on your current platform, so no migration tool can move them. Every existing customer receives an account activation invite and sets a new password. Guest checkout keeps working throughout, so this affects account holders rather than stopping sales, but it needs to be planned as a campaign rather than treated as a technical footnote.
You should expect a temporary dip while search engines recrawl and reassess, and the job is to make it shallow and short. The single biggest factor is the redirect map, because Shopify forces its own URL structure with /products/ and /collections/ prefixes, so almost every indexed address changes. One to one redirects, prepared before launch and tested, are what protects the traffic.
Not on standard plans. Shopify imposes /products/ and /collections/ prefixes that cannot be removed, so whatever structure you have now, the addresses will change. This is why the redirect map is the most important deliverable of a Shopify migration rather than a tidy-up task at the end.
It imports, but for reporting rather than for working with. Historical orders will show against customer records so your data makes sense, and you cannot refund or fulfil against them. Brief your support team on this before launch, because the first person to ask about a previous order will otherwise be told something incorrect.
This is the highest risk part of any migration and it deserves its own plan. Saved payment methods do not transfer, so active subscribers have to re-enrol with new payment details. Every subscriber becomes a decision point, which means comms, timing and often an incentive. If you run a subscription business, scope this before anything else.
Reviews usually live inside an app rather than in the platform, so they move only if you export them before cancelling anything. This is one of the most common permanent losses in a badly planned migration, and it takes years to rebuild. Export first, choose the new app second, cancel the old one last.
It depends far more on complexity than catalogue size. Ten thousand straightforward products is a smaller job than four hundred products carrying configurators, subscriptions and a decade of custom URLs. The build runs in parallel with your existing store trading, so the disruption is concentrated around launch rather than spread across the project.
Find out what your migration actually involves
We will inventory your catalogue, data, apps and indexed URLs, identify what cannot move and what it will cost you, and give you a redirect strategy and a realistic timeline. If the honest answer is that you should stay where you are, that is what you will hear. No obligation, no sales pitch.
Get my free migration plan- URL and data inventory
- What cannot move
- Redirect strategy